Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday March 16, 2012 @05:02PM
from the internet-obstacle-course dept.

troyhunt writes "While we've long known that China takes a fairly aggressive stance on internet censorship, I thought a visit to Shanghai this week would pose a good opportunity to look at just how impactful this was to software developers behind the Great Firewall of China. It turns out that the access control policies make life very difficult at all sorts of levels when accessing simple technology resources we use every day from other countries. But I also found an amazing level of inconsistency with sites and services intended to be off limits being accessible via other means. It's an interesting insight into how our developer peers can and can't work in the country with the world's largest internet population."

Heh. It's fun to watch an ignorant bit of "peevery" shot down by an entry in a well-known dictionary. Not that dictionary makers consider themselves arbiters of correctness, of course, but lots of people insist on believing them to fill that role.

In this case, it's actually a bit unusual to find such an entry, since "impactful" is a simple combination of a common English substantial (a common term for words that are both noun and adjective, and in this case also verb) plus a common suffix. Dictionarie

We (people in my country) don't use Webster's (we use the Oxford Dictionary instead as our standard - mostly). Just because a word is in Websters doesn't mean the word is accepted by the international English community. While we my countrymen will usually tolerate abominations like 'impactful', they come across as quite dissonant and are avoided by better writers and speakers. For example, the the writer could have substituted the word 'significant' for 'impactful'.

My other favourite poor-word-choice peeve is 'architected' when 'designed' is the better word to use. All these faux-formal words being made up by corporate drones when there are perfectly suitable and well accepted alternatives instead. If you have a good vocabulary you choose the simplest word to fit, not make up words to try sound enlightened or technically adept. Use of such words are jarring for those of us who have moved past the stage of complicating our prose (as you learn to do as an undergraduate in university) to the stage of ruthlessly simplifying it where we can.

Fuck prescriptivism. "Impactful" is entirely and fully understandable and a valid word in every sense of the latter.

Also you're the one who sounds faux-formal (oh I bet this pisses you off, a goddamn sentence fragment aaaaa). Just because English isn't currently 100% agglutinative 100% of the time doesn't mean it can't be some of the time. Sincerepostin' over here.

> "Impactful" is entirely and fully understandable and a valid word in every sense of the latter.
Personally, I disagree. For a start people will have to think what the word actually means. Second, even if people do think about what it means, two people may arrive at slightly different definitions/interpretations and therefore slightly different conclusions as to what the writer intended to say. This doesn't piss me off in the least, I was just pointing out that there are usually existing words in common

Name two significantly divergent possible interpretations of "impactful".

I'm not talking about grammar-nazism, I'm talking about staleness. Languages die when you bar them from evolving. Sure, there are certain fields where a strict, formally defined language is preferable — law, science, etc. This is not the case here, there's no doubt what is meant by impactful, no grey areas, no ambiguity.

The grumpy old man in me is just bitter about the direction in which it's evolving. Most of its changes (such as this one) are driven entirely by marketing-speak bullshit from ad executives who never really learned English in the first place. When they create new words, they tend to replace perfectly fine existing words, sound terrible (seriously, "impactful"?), and are irregular forms in regards to the rest of the language.

Name two significantly divergent possible interpretations of "impactful".

1. This gangsterizer was obviously killified by an impactful velocityness of steelish-jacketified leady stuff, thought Inspector Noun-Suffix, abstractly.2. This dynamic corporate motivational seminar will be both uplifting and impactful. To ensure this, we have planted hydraulic rams under the front-row seats and have removed the carpet. Please bring a crash helmet.

It seems to me that both of you (parent and grandparent) are trying to follow a beautiful and necessary impulse of being human: find and represent relevant information; say more with less. Unfortunately, this phrase is all about context, like 'easy'. What's easy for a man is difficult for another. What's good enough for one is unacceptable for another. Context, context, context. And now is when I realize one of you is an idiot and the other is someone who knows his language and can use it well. I'll leave i

Use of words like 'are' is jarring when used with singulars such as 'use'.

Don't be so sensitive. I had to stop and think a few seconds to figure out what could possibly be wrong with that usage. The use of "use" in this case is clearly a noun describing an activity, and such words aren't obviously singular or plural, though one could also say "uses" in this case. I didn't notice the number mismatch until it was pointed out, and I'm a native speaker. What I noticed first was the omission of the definite article, but "the" is optional in this case. It's just that my native di

My favourite newbizgovspeak is "administrate" - when I'm almost certain that what administrators used to do when they performed administration was administer. Somehow a perfectly good transtitive/nontransitive verb got forcefully detransitivised the hard way.

I am expectfully confidentised that soon we will see the growthed riseupping of "system administrationisers".

Indeed. What's so amazing about inconsistency? It would be fairly amazing if some organization dumb enough to implement censorship did it 100% effectively. Even something as simple as DRM on itunes files, there are workarounds that were simple, like burning it to a CD, then ripping it back as an MP3.

(Yes yes, apple apologists, they HAVE stopped adding DRM, though they haven't released files that were bought previous to that date, and their legal teams prevent anyone from unlocking those songs to play

Indeed. What's so amazing about inconsistency? It would be fairly amazing if some organization dumb enough to implement censorship did it 100% effectively. Even something as simple as DRM on itunes files, there are workarounds that were simple, like burning it to a CD, then ripping it back as an MP3.

(Yes yes, apple apologists, they HAVE stopped adding DRM, though they haven't released files that were bought previous to that date, and their legal teams prevent anyone from unlocking those songs to play on, sa

I spent 4 months in Shanghai and was considering moving there. Shanghai is an amazing city.
However, by the end of the 4 months I could not get out of there fast enough. Their Internet censoring/monitoring slows down your Internet connection so much it is sometimes not useable.
Skype and many other programs/websites we use regularly in the west are not legal in China. Some are blocked for political reasons and other are blocked so people are forced to use local versions of the products. The local versions all have built in monitoring for the government.
Almost all expats in China use VPN connections for their daily work.
Hong Kong is the complete opposite. Nothing is censored there and their Internet connections are extremely fast! I can live in HK.

you do realize that the "one country, two systems" deal is only valid for 50 years after PRC assumed control over hong kong? so there's as little as 35 years left before all hell breaks loose there... and PRC has already tried, countless times with no signs of stopping, to reduce the economic and social freedoms and exert more control over judicial system and media. so unless you're like 50+ yrs old and probably won't be around in 35 years, you may like to live there NOW but you certainly

VPN.
VPNMakers.com - $5/month, works great from all over China (including Shanghai, where I live half-time). No problem getting into corporate networks, secured websites, or even streaming Hulu/Pandora/MOG/Netflix.

Having tried many free ones before I decided to pay, I can say that nearly all of them are slow, do not always work - and are not reliable at all (drop connection regularly). If you're actually developing and making money, spend a few bucks (32 RMB) and get a REAL VPN connection.

Been to Shanghai more than I can count. Basically, the network is poorly maintained. Everything from double-NATing, poor routing, to offline DNS servers. The problem at least residential side are systemic.

Been to Shanghai more than I can count. Basically, the network is poorly maintained. Everything from double-NATing, poor routing, to offline DNS servers. The problem at least residential side are systemic.

I live in Shanghai half-time (out by Qibao town, in Minhang). My apartment had poor Internet service, until I complained to China Telecom and demanded they honor the contract I had with them. Ended up I was too far from the CO to get the 3 Mbps connection I was paying for, so they pulled fiber to my apartment block and now I get a solid 8-10 Mbps down/1 Mbps up without a hitch.

Use China's laws to your advantage. If a contract is offered, accepted and paid for, then legally they HAVE to give you what you want - there is no way for them to back out or refund the money. Service has been paid for, they must provide the service regardless of cost.

Where my wife's parents live, they get pretty poor cable and DSL service. They live in a nicer area of Shanghai though. But all the building including the walls are poured concrete. I honestly doubt there's conduit in place. Maybe the electricians are lazy, but anytime they add a new like or repair, they always seem to run it on the outside of the wall. I'm assuming they can do this with twisted pair or fiber?

Also, isn't China Telcom a state owned and operated utility? Or has it always been privatized unde

There's a central chase next to the stairwell/elevator shaft in most apartment blocks, where cable and phone is delivered. They pulled fiber into that space, then tapped through the wall for me. And yes, China Telecom is State-owned, but they still have to abide by the rules. I pushed them on it, and it did take 6 weeks - but I got the speedy service I contracted for. The techs were pretty worthless, and it took 9 visits - but it did happen.

What you are missing is that China also jails people who point out corruption, mis-governance, unsafe practices such as the addition of mildly poisonous food additives to food products that result in baby deaths (eg the melamine added to milk by a Chinese dairy producer - and then blame it on the New Zealand company that acquired them), illegal and unreasonable acquisition of citizen land, etc. Yes, this happens elsewhere too, but not on the same scale nor without the same redresses available elsewhere.

I don't bother with stand-up comedy — or any form of comedy — in the United States of America, because they make me feel bad about being an American. I am from the mid-Western United States. We are a constant target of their rhetoric.

Three things about your post are seriously wrong-headed:

1. Get a sense of humor. Use it. Nurture it. Exercise it.

2. Instead of feeling bad about being an American, why don't you focus on becoming a better person? Then take that behavior into your community as an example of how people should behave. What I'm saying is don't blame comedians for pointing out your short-comings but thank them, accept the criticism, evolve, and grow beyond it.

I'm a developer currently living in China and working for an Australian company. It is immensely difficult to work here without a VPN and I notice it in every part of the work. Searching the internet for information about a problem is nigh on impossible, Google searches are intermittent, I can't access a large amount of developer blogs, and stackoverflow is intermittent too.

One funny one I came across last night was after installing Mint. The Ubuntu repos aren't blocked, but the main Mint repo is. Lucki

Disclaimer: I'm a native Chinese living in Shanghai. Somehow access to/. isn't disrupted, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is in the future. Simple complaints about the GFW, online or otherwise, is too common to be considered sensitive here AFAIK. Buying a VPN is probably so as well; I have been too lazy to get one myself, but considering the amount of lost productivity, maybe I should.

That said, Google is borderline unusable here. When I search for anything technical, 30% of the time the connection gets reset and google becomes inaccessible for several minutes, and if the search results are shown, about half of the sites are inaccessible, including most foreign blog sites and many of the mailing list archives. It is so frustrating that I'd wish for the evil bit to be implemented, or bang the keyboard refreshing the page in a vain attempt to DoS the machine sending out these bogus TCP reset packets.

I consider the GFW a kind of malicious DoS attack on our network infrastructure. We do have laws against such attacks, and I think those responsible for it may well deserve a few years in prison.

If they are sending TCP reset packets, you do realize you can use firewall/router rules to drop those reset packets. You don't have to allow them to use that simple trick to thwart your browsing. We did the same when Comcast here in the USA was using that same trick to disrupt Bit Torrent transfers.

There was a paper on how they were doing this released maybe 5 years ago. I tried setting up firewall rules as they described and I didn't have any success. I could be doing something wrong but I suspect they've figured this one out.

The problem is that they are sending reset packets to both sides, and if Google's servers honor these reset packets, it doesn't matter whether my computer does.

There was indeed a project, named after a fairly well-known story in Chinese literature ("west chambers" or something), that finds a way to work around this problem. IIRC it sends special packets to make these reset packets ineffective on the other side due to timing issues. However, since this only helps with TCP resets and cannot deal with IP blo

But I use TOR and I have a colocated server in the states that I use to browse the web using SSH forwarding...
I use Putty with tcp forwarding turned on in putty then on firefox i tell it manual proxy set to localhost and port I set putty to, then ssh into my colo server in the states which is really fast and browse anywhere unfiltered.

For everything else I use Tor with manually added exit nodes

on my colo I also installed rapidleech, rutorrent web front end to rtorrrent and setup password protection on